this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Google’s Search AI Says Slavery Was Good, Actually (futurism.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology
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Google's AI-driven Search Generative Experience have been generating results that are downright weird and evil, ie slavery's positives.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

He was able to convince the majority that his way of thinking was the right way to go and deployed a plan to that effect

So, you're basically saying an effective leader is someone who can convince people to go along with them for a sustained period. Jim Jones was an effective leader by that metric. Which I would dispute. So was the guy who led the Donner Party to their deaths.

This is why I see a problem with this. You and I are able to discuss this and work out what each other means.

But in a world where people are time-poor and critical thinking takes time, errors based on fundamental misunderstandings of consensual meanings can flourish.

And the speed and sheer amount of global digital communication means that they can be multiplied and compounded in ways that individual fact checkers will not be able to challenge sucessfully.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean Jim Jones was pretty damn effective at convincing a large group of people to commit mass suicide. If he'd been ineffective, he'd have been one of the thousands of failed cult leaders you and I have never heard of. Similarly, if Hitler had been ineffective, it wouldn't have takes the combined forces of half the world to fight him.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is true, I guess the difference in the Jim Jones scenario is whether you define effective leadership as being able to get your plan carried out (even if that plan is killing everyone you lead) or whether you define it as achieving good outcomes for those you lead.

Hitler didn't do either of those things in the end so I still don't rate him, but I can see why you would if you just look at the first part of his reign.

AI often produces unintended consequences based on its interpretations - there's a great TED talk on some of these - and I think with the LLMs we have way more variables in our inputs than we have time to define them. That will probably change as they get refined.